Class A (16 page)

Rival fans shuffle past us through the gates. She grins and says, “We’re coming for you.” They squint, see her outline in the sun, denim skirt, oversized Louie the LumberKing T-shirt, Pall Malls, cherry Pepsi, and they recognize her. “Oh, it’s
you
,” they say, but they say it grinning. She jerks her thumb in their direction as they move away. “You see,” she says, “they know.” I nod.

She told me once about the strike that started in 1979, back when Archer Daniels Midland hadn’t yet bought the corn syrup and ethanol plant and it was still Clinton Corn, back when the town’s population hovered around thirty-five thousand. Joyce’s people came to Clinton for work. Her grandfather and his brothers were Clinton factory laborers, and then her father and her uncles stayed on at the same factory. They came
home smelling like something edible but not something you’d want to eat. And Joyce didn’t like the way their hands looked, gnarled. “We are farmers here, basically,” she told me. “Everybody farms something. It’s just a matter of who you’re farming for.”

But that is a reaching, romantic way to put it. Because manufacturing isn’t farming. Of course it isn’t. Yes, the Clinton factory reaps Iowa’s farm crops. Yes, I’ve seen the trucks full of thousands of acres’ worth of harvested corn lining up to sell their wares. And, yes, I see the trains always rumbling out, sending that once-raw Iowa produce to the world. But it’s not easy to think of individual farmers in that equation. Because even the farms that supply the mammoth appetite of ADM are, themselves, mammoth. Sometimes fans talk to me about the family farm that they once had, two hundred acres, self-sufficient. The ones who still farm do so on the side and only because it feels part of how they know themselves. They work full-time at factories to make the farming possible. Families like Joyce’s came to work, never to own.

The strike seemed inconsequential until it resurfaced in so many of our conversations—the year the town became something loud and then quieted into a hush that hasn’t ended. Joyce’s family had lived just blocks from the factory in the neighborhood where most of the old Irish families had always lived and worked, then moved to a little nicer part of town. Everything was familiar, and then it wasn’t. She could walk over and see the factory and the throngs, hundreds of men identical from a distance in jeans and boots and stained T-shirts, holding signs. She could see other men get out of trucks with out-of-state license plates and push through the picket line to take up new jobs. There were hundreds of workers coming, replacing nearly a thousand who had seemingly always been there but were soon to be squeezed out. She couldn’t make out her father. Rocks were thrown; the police came. A few people got the shit beaten out of them, but it was hard to tell by whom. There were gunshots once, ringing out from somewhere in the middle of it all. The smoke rose above the scene, always, never a day when production was stalled.

That was thirty years ago, but it seems as if history stopped then. Or, rather, it seems as if the way things had been, were supposed to be, stopped. It was the beginning of what is now.

Joyce sings the harmony during the national anthem because everyone
else sings the melody. That’s how I noticed her first. A hoarse, lilting voice an octave below the rest.

“Who is that?” I asked Betty. Betty gave a warm smile.

“Oh, singing so loud?” she said. “That’s Joyce.”

It was April then, still cold, and I saw her breath as she sang. I’d heard about her before, always from men, never anything nice. On that snowy day in February, my first in town, Ted, the general manager, slugged down a Mountain Dew and said that if I was going to get to know the team, there would be some fans I would get to know, too, right ones and not-so-right ones. Joyce was an ever-present face of the not-so-right, a bitch on wheels and a psycho hellcat all in one breath. Joyce will always be around, he told me. Joyce is always wanting
things
, he told me.

I first spoke to her on the benches beyond the left-field fence, and I was wary. It was 4:00 p.m., batting practice, and we were the only people in the stadium not in uniform. She sat with eight or ten freshly gathered balls in a ring on the picnic table in front of her. She held one up for me and displayed a frayed bit of red seam dangling off it. She said Vinnie hit that one so hard that it started to unravel itself. She told me I could touch it if I wanted.

“Do you sell these balls?” I asked her.

I liked that she pursed her lips and wrinkled her forehead and looked full-on offended before saying no.

I’d already become annoyed by the kinds of opportunistic fans who elbowed for position above the dugout and then pretended as if they hadn’t. Men, always, with piles of black three-ring binders at the ready and checklists of players’ numbers organized into columns of “worth it” and “not worth it.” I saw them daily, scurrying to snatch up whatever commerce could be taken from a twenty-year-old’s promise, the scavengers of this ecosystem. When a first-round draft pick like Nick “Nick Franklin, You’re
Hot
” Franklin walked by, I watched them ask him to sign eight identical cards, all of which would go on eBay. When brown-skinned Latinos in uniform walked by, I heard them call out a wrong name and then, when their target didn’t turn around smiling dutifully, mutter about the highfalutin attitude of foreign prospects ruining America’s game.

“Most of them are worthless,” a fat man in a sweat suit told me once as he closed his binder, referring, I think, to both the cardboard rectangles
and the men whose faces adorn them. “But some are worth a dollar, some two, and some can be worth a thousand, so you keep coming back.”

No, Joyce shook her head at me. No, that’s not the point.

When batting practice was over, the players trotted through the door in the left-field fence and headed down the path to the clubhouse, spikes clacking on concrete. Joyce cut a diagonal line toward them and intercepted Vinnie. She held up the ball with the frayed stitching, proof of his power—
look, look at what you did
.

He signed it in looping, practiced cursive, a huge
V
, a huge
C
, and then little sine waves in the middle. And his number, 43.

“I’ll be here every game,” Joyce told me after the players were all off-limits inside the clubhouse. “You can come sit with me during batting practice if you like.”

She gave me one of the balls she’d picked from the grass, hit by Nick Franklin. A gift. She showed me the smudge of wood grain where the bat had connected, like a fingerprint.

Today, we’re in Cedar Rapids, and Joyce is humming along to the pregame music piped from stadium speakers, country songs, all so instructive about how we should be. As she hums, Joyce surveys the players’ numbers on the field. Thirty-three is here and 50 and 43 and 46, good, good, the players she likes still filling their assigned jerseys, no surprises, no covert, nighttime van rides to the airport, robbing her of a chance to say good-bye. And 3 is here, Nick Franklin, the best. Thank God.

But where is 14, Brian Moran, her favorite relief pitcher? She enlists my help, and we look together, running the tips of our fingers along the distant backs of the players, until it becomes impossible to ignore that there is no 14 in green and gray.

“I think he’s gone, Joyce,” I say, and then I regret how flat, how commonplace, I sound.

She finishes her cherry Pepsi with a loud gulp. She begins to nod her head, slowly at first, then progressively faster, building up affirmative steam.

“Good,” she says finally, a hard word to get out. “Good. Good. He deserved to move up. He had such a funky delivery. Do you remember?”

Nostalgia has never been so instant. In this type of fandom, providing unrelenting support and the occasional baked good at the starting point in the trajectory of careers, things end fast. Things move by. If you don’t grip hard to the moments that happened in front of you, if you can’t quantify them, then they’re gone. Brian Moran will never come back to Iowa, barring a major career collapse on his end. His promise will propel him forward, maybe into the major leagues, probably not. Either way, he is no longer flesh here. He is already a story to covet and mold.

Do you remember? Do you remember?

In Joyce’s notebook, there is the beginning of a draft of a letter that was supposed to be the first in a series. It begins with “Dear Brian.” So far, it ends with “I like the Beatles, but I also like ZZ Top. What kind of music do you like?” There was supposed to be more. It was supposed to begin a pen pal relationship in preparation for the day when Brian Moran left, but Brian Moran has already left, and he never wrote down his address. “Facebook me,” was the last thing he said to her, called out over his shoulder as he trotted to the clubhouse a few days ago.

No, no, that’s not the point.

There used to be a tin shed behind the stadium. If you got up there, you could stand and watch the whole game for free. Joyce and her brother could get there on their own. They could walk from their home in south Clinton, a mile down Second Street, right on Sixth Avenue North, as if blindfolded, stopping at the right moments, subconsciously measuring steps and knowing they were close when they smelled low tide off the river and heard the hollow pop of baseballs burrowing into old leather.

On top of the shed, older boys jostled for position to see the game and then past it, the town, their neighborhood, the factories, the river, Illinois to the east, and the suggestion of all the other states beyond it, laid out next to one another like patches of fresh sod.

Joyce was going to climb up. And she was scared of heights. But even ground-bound, she managed to watch. She stood alone, fingers gripping chain link, peering through a gap to see the players. And she didn’t feel closed-in like she usually did, like a bird caught in flypaper in the
summertime, so much moving and flapping, losing feathers and going nowhere.

I imagine her there watching, when she tells me about it. I imagine her shrunken down, unwrinkled, seeing the smoke, thinking of her father cleaning the petrified edges of corn syrup tanks with an old broom handle. She smiled when she looked at the field and the men in white uniforms, bleached every night, gleaming like teeth right after you come back from the dentist.

There are two Cedar Rapids Kernels players whom Joyce hasn’t yet propositioned for an autograph. They’re new to the squad. Two budding stars have been moved up to AA-ball in Arkansas, and these are their replacements. Joyce bolts for the home dugout seven minutes before the game begins. I hold her bag and shuffle behind her, watching her broad, rounded shoulders dip and shimmy through the rows.

When she reaches her destination, she glances back as I try to catch up. Speed is crucial. Some players will look for any pause or slackened body language as an excuse to flee. It seems that after spring training, the thrill of being sought out and cooed at and commodified wears off, and the players grow instantaneously world-weary, so damn tired of these overeager rubes squawking their names. But some stay nice. You can’t tell until you meet them. So you have to rush your pens and your keepsakes into their hands just to make sure. Joyce needs a ball.

Finally reaching her, I rummage through her purse, shaped and designed like a baseball, for one of twelve baseballs that have been stored within. We picked them together last week behind the left-field fence, like careful farmers. She reaches out to the young men below her on the field. They are polite ones. They ask her name. “Joyce,” she says. “Joyce. Oh, you’ll know me soon enough.” They smile and they shrug and they sign. “The complete set,” she says.

I used to want to be obsessed. Obsession, particularly with something odd or something past, felt like a badge of personhood. It was noble, careful. My brother was obsessed with über-masculine German folktales,
so he bought them as instructions for how to be, tried to read them in their native tongue. He was obsessed with music, with listening to things nobody else listened to. So he saved records and mixed tapes, racked in immaculate order, even when everything else began to dissolve. It was pride I felt when, after the funeral, I was the one who laid claim to all his former possessions. But then I ignored his record player until it broke, threw his records and storybooks in a sloppy pile in storage, along with all the other gifts that I never cared for, that I left behind. I did not have it in me to appreciate what all the saved things meant.

Maybe that’s why I feel nervous sometimes next to Joyce, yet surprisingly loving other times. I want a mania that feels noble and scholarly, the kind of obsession that comes to those with the capacity to see the importance of what might otherwise seem mundane. A legacy that I want to think I was born into, the way I have always imagined every person with a deeper sensitivity to the world to be.

“It is a pleasant thing to sit here, this rainy afternoon, with the books and the ‘collection’ close at hand,” Adrian Joline wrote in 1902 in
Meditations of an Autograph Collector
. “I have certainly been arranging that collection for ten years, and it is not arranged yet.”

I like that he doesn’t sound crazy, just precise.

After I first met Joyce that day on the benches beyond left field, I drove home and watched a marathon of
Hoarders
, the reality show about pack rats. I ate a whole bag of pita chips, condescendingly enthralled by the directionless mania on-screen. People, mostly women with missing teeth, wailed at the camera and ran their hands through cracked, caked, arbitrary garbage as if it were tillable earth. Pet carcasses were discovered. Lives that had become forgettable in the accumulation of stuff. This was beyond sensitivity. Look at the freaks. I wondered if this was how I should categorize Joyce, the fierce dedication in her blue eyes, her dead front tooth left unfixed.

But that was before I really watched her, when the misogynistic warnings about her were still fresh in my mind. That was before I saw how little was arbitrary in her actions. How delicately she approached each morsel of memorabilia. There was care to everything, and thought. Like a true collector, I’ve begun to think, Joyce musters up affection for each saved name and object. Like Joline’s books. Like my brother’s old Abba
records with the chicken-scratch notes still taped on:
Every song is just a little bit flat. That’s what makes it work
. It’s not so much the keeping as the breathing of significance into the boredom of what is kept.